SEMI-FICTIONAL CHRONICLE of the EVIL THAT INFECTS WASHINGTON, D.C.
To read Prologue and Character Guide, please see www.washingtonhorrorblog.com, updated 6/6//2017.
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Thursday, November 25, 2010

Cease and Desist

Economists Fen Do Ping and Luciano Talaverdi were hunkered down in the Federal Reserve Board Research Library, refusing to cease and desist no matter what Sarah Palin said. Ping had never celebrated a Thanksgiving, and he wasn't going to start now, when the Camelot Society needed him to rally for besieged Ben Bernanke. Talaverdi had gone to a few American Thanksgivings since moving to America, but the food appalled him and the endless drone of American football on television irritated him. Plus he had made a point of telling Obi Wan woman he had no plans for Thanksgiving and would be at the Fed, and he was desperately hoping she would show up, or invite him to her house. For weeks he had been adding sweet little sayings and funny little jokes to every email he sent her, trying to butter her up. (Surely she had become fond of him by now?) “Capital may be king, but liquidity is Robespierre.” (How could that not make her smile?!) “Slapped in the face by the invisible hand”. (A real zinger!) And attached to the latest Criticized Asset Report for the top 20 financial institutions, little cartoon assets talking trash to each other: "You're so ugly that your mother volunteered you for a hostile takeover by the Mafia." "Oh, yeah? Well, you're a 90-pound weakling, and after your mother gave you a haircut, you looked like a hairless chihuahua!" "Oh, yeah? Well, you're so stupid that you think OTTI* stands for a rebel leader in the Lord's Resistance Army!" (* OTTI stands for "other than temporarily impaired" assets--a fancy term for things you can actually sell.)

If only I could speak to her in Italian, the language of love! Talaverdi let out yet another sigh and went back to cross-referencing the tomes spread out in front of him on the round table. Ping shook his head at the embarrassing love sickness on display and went back to typing up his new economic theorem inspired by the sight of squirrels burying acorns in the hallowed grounds of the Federal Reserve Building.

Over at Southwest Plaza, Glenn Michael Beckmann was re-reading the restraining order former girlfriend Christine O'Donnell had taken out against him. Cease and desist, blah blah blah.... He opened up his gray filing cabinet covered with bumper stickers from the National Rifle Association and various militia groups and filed the court order in his "fascist overreaching" folder. If that bitch doesn't wanna get back together with me, she could at least have the guts to tell me to my face! What a hypocrite--running to the Nanny State to pamper and protect her. Sissy! And though he no longer had access to her Facebook page, he had ascertained from other sources where she was spending Thanksgiving and was going to confront her this afternoon--or confront the goons that had been running her life for the past six months. He strapped on his waist, shoulder, and ankle gun holsters and then loaded them up with the weapons he had purchased at the last gun show--not for her, for the goons. (Or any state troopers trying to stop him from exercising his God-given right to drive 90 miles per hour on the open road--because how else was he supposed to get anywhere now that the fly-fascists had taken over all the airports?) He grabbed the heat-n-serve rolls from the kitchen (he would never show up empty-handed--his mother had raised him right), then took one last look in the hallway mirror. Today you're gonna give thanks for remembering what a real man is, baby!

Over at Prince and Prowling, former Senator Evermore Breadman had fled the ennui of his suburban home under the pretext that he really had some urgent work to get done, and with a promise to be home in time to carve the turkey. Though he had thought decades earlier he had married into political royalty, it did not save him from a pill-popping shrew of a sister-in-law, a mother-in-law who spent each Thanksgiving morning vacuuming every inch of drapery and carpeting in their house with a mask over her face, a father-in-law who always brought a rifle and spent the morning shooting at squirrels in the backyard, a nephew who sported a goatee and Che Guevara t-shirt for every family photo-op, and a niece who liked to examine everybody's clothing labels and inform them what human rights abuses and environmental travesties were committed in the act of producing their chosen apparel. Breadman took a sip of his turkey-flavored soft drink and picked up the phone to call back former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay--who had just been convicted in Texas and faced a possible lifetime sentence for money laundering. Tom, Tom, Tom--there are so many ways to make and spend money legally in this country! You should have listened to me in 2002. He dialed the number and wrote down the start time of the call: he would send an invoice for anything over five minutes, even though he had never done criminal appellate work in his life.

Not far away, Laura Moreno was in the workroom trying to earn some extra cash to make up for the week she had been out sick. Years had come and gone, and still Prince and Prowling would not give her paid sick leave, paid holidays, paid health insurance, or paid vacation days. Her pay rate was the same, even though her responsibilities had grown steadily. They were never going to fire her and never going to hire her--she would be a contract attorney here until the day she died. (If only she knew why....) Chloe Cleavage was on a Caribbean cruise this week, and Moreno was doing her own job and Cleavage's, too--which included logging into Cleavage's email account, unbeknownst to Cleavage! (The senior partner had ordered the IT department to make the account accessible to Moreno, and here she was.) Cleavage had 5,000 emails in her Sent email folder because she was unaware that she was supposed to delete or move them. About 2,000 of them had the same Subject line: "stop sending so many emails", and these had gone to temps who asked too many questions about their work while Cleavage was trying to make bids on e-Bay or update her Facebook page. Another 2,000 were joke-forwarding emails, And somewhere in the remaining 1,000, Moreno had to search for clues to the work assignments that Cleavage had doled out over the past few months, because nothing the temps were doing made any sense. Moreno paused over an odd subject line: "you don't know me!". She pulled up the Sent email to see Cleavage's simple reply of "LOL", and then read the original email--which turned out to be somebody's asking Cleavage if she were in the witness protection program. Moreno sat back and pondered this because it would explain quite a lot.

Over in upper Georgetown, the guests had arrived at Judge Sowell Ame's house for the Sense of Entitlement Anonymous (D.C. Chapter) Thanksgiving potluck. Ame was thankful it was a potluck and he only had to cook one thing. Real estate tycoon Calico Johnson was thankful that Chloe Cleavage had gone on a full-week Caribbean cruise and would not be looking to him for a warm and fuzzy holiday (or any type of holiday). Bridezilla was thankful that she had an excuse to avoid all the weird food her Indian boyfriend's family and friends would be stinking up his apartment with today. And Dick Cheney was thankful that the Bush and Palin clans were tearing each other apart.

Out at National Airport, TSA agent 432 was making good use of the audiotape he had found while still employed as a White House security guard--an audiotape on the art of conversational hypnosis techniques (which somebody had left on a men's room shelf). So far he had subtly convinced at least two-dozen men that they should avoid the radiation of the full-body scanner and let him do the patdown instead. He had never been gay, and he could not explain the thrill he got from this, but he also could not deny this was the best Thanksgiving ever! Twenty feet away, reporter Perry Winkle was waving other passengers past him in the security line as he continued to take photographs of TSA agent 432. What a world.

Deep in the river, Ardua of the Potomac was not enjoying all the thankfulness floating around. She also sensed a threat coming to something she had thought would endure through the ages--the belovedly putrid and evil Mystery Mountain. But she could not fight an enemy that had not yet made his move....